Tag Archives: Ian McEwan

Clouds, bees and artificial friends

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Decorative image of a bee on a flowerAnthropomorphism featured in several of the books that I read during my recent digital detox [see ‘Entropy and junkies‘ on August 2nd, 2023].  I really liked the opening section of ‘When I Sing, Mountains Dance‘ by Irene Sola which is narrated from the perspective of clouds that arrive over a landscape with painfully full ‘black bellies, burdened with cold, dark water, lightening bolts, thunderclaps.’  Her poetic prose, beautifully translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, is wonderfully evocative and explores the complex relationship between people and the land they inhabit.  I was less impressed with a fig tree as a narrator in Elif Shafak’s novel ‘The Island of Missing Trees‘.  There was too much emphasis on facts about trees and their relationship to the fauna and flora around them which are well-described in recent non-fiction books [see, for example, ‘Tree are amongst the slowest moving being with which we share our world‘ on October 16th, 2019 and ‘The rest of the planat has been waiting patiently for us to figure it out‘ on September 21st, 2022].  However, I did enjoy the bee’s eye perspective on being trapped in a room when someone closed the window through which the bee had flown to find out what was happening inside.  At the moment, I am reading ‘Klara and the Sun‘ by Kazou Ishiguro, which is told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend or AF, and is in a similar vein to ‘Frankisstein‘ by Jeanette Winterson and ‘Machines like Me‘ by Ian McEwan [see ‘Where is AI on the hype curve?‘ on August 12th, 2020].

 

Where is AI on the hype curve?

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I suspect that artificial intelligence is somewhere near the top of the ‘Hype Curve’ [see ‘Hype cycle’ on September 23rd, 2015].  At the beginning of the year, I read Max Tegmark’s book, ‘Life 3.0 – being a human in the age of artificial intelligence’ in which he discusses the prospects for artificial general intelligence and its likely impact on life for humans.  Artificial intelligence means non-biological intelligence and artificial general intelligence is the ability to accomplish any cognitive task at least as well as humans.  Predictions vary about when we might develop artificial general intelligence but developments in machine learning and robotics have energised people in both science and the arts.  Machine learning consists of algorithms that use training data to build a mathematical model and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed for the task.  Three of the books that I read while on vacation last month featured or discussed artificial intelligence which stimulated my opening remark about its position on the hype curve.  Jeanette Winterson in her novel, ‘Frankissstein‘ foresees a world in which humanoid robots can be bought by mail order; while Ian McEwan in his novel, ‘Machines Like Me‘, goes back to the early 1980s and describes a world in which robots with a level of consciousness close to or equal to humans are just being introduced to the market the place.  However, John Kay and Mervyn King in their recently published book, ‘Radical Uncertainty – decision-making beyond numbers‘, suggest that artificial intelligence will only ever enhance rather replace human intelligence because it will not be able to handle non-stationary ill-defined problems, i.e. problems for which there no objectively correct solution and that change with time.  I think I am with Kay & King and that we will shortly slide down into the trough of the hype curve before we start to see the true potential of artificial general intelligence implemented in robots.

The picture shows our holiday bookshelf.